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Enselic writes "After almost three years since the release of GIMP 2.2, the GIMP developers have just announced the release of GIMP 2.4. The release notes speak of scalable bitmap brushes, redesigned rectangle/ellipse selection tools, redesigned crop tool, a new foreground selection tool, a new align tool, reorganized menu layouts, improved zoomed in/zoomed out image display quality, improved printing and color management support and a new perspective clone tool."

The stable GIMP releases have even numbers. The last stable release before 2.4.x was GIMP 2.2.x, starting with 2.2.0 released in December 2004. So that was almost three years ago. There were several bug-fix releases in the meantime, up to 2.2.17.

The unstable 2.3.x releases ended with the last versions becoming release candidates for 2.4.

Not everywhere, but in enough places that I'd think people would notice.For example: The Linux kernel. I'm running 2.6.22. The 2 is most likely incrementing normally, since there was a 1.0.0 release, that was considered "stable", or as much as it can be. The 22 also increments normally, I think -- though I may be wrong about that.

But I did upgrade directly from 2.4 to 2.6. This is because Linux 2.5 was a development branch. Highly unstable, but it went on for quite awhile, with the most essential parts back

CMYK colors and other functionality that keeps it from being able to replace Photoshop completely? Not to understate all the effort that has been put into it, but something like that does seem pretty basic for three years of development.

The paper I shoot for doesn't require squat. Just shoot pictures. If they're good, they use them. We have editors that use Photoshop to crop, resize and color correct if necessary. But. If they wanted to use the gimp they could do that too. No one holds a gun to their head and says use Photoshop. It's just the "industry standard", but if you can do the job with different tools then go for it.

That is a little egocentric. To make my point let's just take "industrialized" countries/regions other than the U.S. You would have to agree that they would have a lot of graphic artists in that these are predominantly capitalistic based economies where advertising is important. Using population as a roughly equivalent measure of market base (numbers are rough but pretty close):

Of the ones who do care, the majority are not in America. Of any one country sure, but that doesn't really matter. Companies and people buy software. And anyway, even if there aren't as many advertising agencies in those other places (and I would think there would be comparable numbers) the overwhelming population advantage of the other industrial countries still says you are very likely wrong.

And then there are the up and comers like India. Even if only a fraction of their population can be considered at an 'industrial level' (recognizing that there are still areas of poverty and ignorance), given the population size, that still represents a lot of people who care. And as their country gets more advanced that will only increase. So for arguments sake let's add another say 250,000,000 million people to draw from. I'd include China, but they would probably just pirate whatever someone else made anyway.:D

And like I said, the rest of the world is rising economically while the U.S.A. seems to be shrinking. Probably due to stupidity like software patents and over emphasis on stock holders profits instead of long term growth of companies (short term gain instead of long term steady performance... a tortoise and the hare algorithm:) ).

You would have to agree that they would have a lot of graphic artists in that these are predominantly capitalistic based economies where advertising is important.

It isn't just advertising and it isn't just print.

You are irrelevant to the commercial artist and designer anywhere in the world if you can't match Photoshop point-for-point.

In January 2003, the Scottish Parliament debated a petition...to refer to the blue in the Scottish flag (saltire) as 'Pantone 300'. Countries such as Canada and South Korea and organizations such as the FIA have also chosen to refer to specific Pantone colors to use when producing flags. U.S. States including Texas have set legislated the PMS colors of their flags.Pantone [wikipedia.org]

A lot of the key algorithms, particularly for color space conversion, are patented. Guess who holds a bunch of those patents?

Oh please. That is not and never has been the problem. The problem is that the program was initially created with the assumption that all images would be 8-bit RGB, and then a huge amount of code was built on top of that silly assumption.

Yes, you can run into IP issues with things like Pantone, DIC, Toyo, or a particular set of CMYK transforms, etc, but that has nothing to do with the limitations of the GIMP. There are plenty of other image editors that have no problem doing color space conversions or dealing with >8-bit images because they were written by programmers who actually listen to graphics professionals.

Crap I must have violated those a bunch of times when I bought my first color printer and had to write software to drive it... this was probably nearly 20 years ago. You'd think that if there were such a patent it would have expired long ago given that computer driven CMYK printing has been around for a long time relatively speaking.

CMYK and spot colors by themselves are not patent encumberd. They are actually part of the open published standards for Postscript and PDF. Anyone saying anything different is clueless or spreading FUD and/or openly demonstrating their ignorance of the fact.

The Gimp developers do intend to bring CMYK to the app, but the underlying graphics engine is based around 8bpp RGB. Rather than hack the old engine to work with CMYK and higher bit depths, they decided to build the future Gimp on a generic graphical library called GEGL [gegl.org]. That meant waiting until GEGL had a stable API and worked well enough to be better than the existing 8bpp engine in production use.

GEGL will most likely be in 2.6, along with the new MMIWorks-designed UI UI [gimp.org]

The answer is unfortunately very simple: not enough contributions. The number of active GIMP and GEGL developers is probably much smaller than you think.

Most developers work on GEGL during their spare time and this is not always easy. When you only have a handful of active developers and they can only spend a few hours per week on improving the code or discussing enhancements, it is difficult to do everything quickly. Also, there was a gap of several years during which almost nobody worked on GEGL.

I think that if only a few percent of the people who complain about GIMP or GEGL would try to start contributing to the projects, then GIMP would have had perfect support for 16 bits per color channel since several years. Note that there are many ways to contribute [gimp.org] and there is room for everybody. Besides programmers who help with the code, the contributions to the documentation, translations, bug reports, web site and tutorials are always appreciated.

Respecting your software freedom to share and modify the program has never been an option with Photoshop, no matter how much you pay. Freedom has always been a part of the GIMP.

Why stress software freedom? I want the social solidarity that you only get in freedom; I want to be independent from masters and make sure my computer only obeys me. I'd rather have less functional or powerful free software than a more powerful or reliable proprietary program because I can hire people to improve the free program or I can ask the community to help me improve the free program. I can't free Photoshop. The catch here is that most people haven't been taught to value their software freedom, so they don't know to look for it and they haven't been taught to think of the consequences when their freedom is absent. I aim to change this by teaching people to value freedom for its own sake. I hope you will too.

That's great that you value your ideology that highly, but most of us, on the other hand, want whatever gets the job done best, most easily, or some combination of those two. In many cases, this software will be proprietary software, so your fight, if you really want to continue your fight, should be to get the development teams to make their stuff better. Until the free alternative is better, easier, or some combination than the normal, proprietary product, you are engaged in a hopeless battle.

But what if you value a piece of software that actually works? The GIMP simply doesn't do what many, many professional artists need. If it did, it'd do really well and eat Photoshop's lunch. Most professional artists know of the GIMP--and they know it simply isn't up to snuff.

It also is intentionally perverted when compared to the industry standard, Photoshop. If it worked similarly, the market share would probably be higher even with the whole "free" price tag.

Hell, I strive to use open-source software whenever I can, and quite frankly the GIMP is useless for me. Why not make the software work better, then proselytize when you have something worth bragging about? Take Linux for example--I have used Linux since about 1998, but it was only when I first tried Ubuntu 5.10 that I felt comfortable recommending it to others as a primary operating system, because at that point it had reached a stage where it was useful.

(And a side note: Most people I know would still shoot themselves in the foot before using something called "The Gimp" in a professional environment.)

If you're a professional, than the $600 price tag probably won't phase you . That's probably what you'd bill your clients for a days work. $600 is nothing. However, for the hobbyist and basic home user, GIMP probably does just about everything then need it to do, and is increasing in functionality all the time. It also comes with a price tag of $0. So while I think it's important for GIMP to strive to be as good as Photoshop, being not quite as good, but very good and free still makes it a very good tool.

Didn't RedHat package postgres as the RedHat Database Engine for a while ? Changing the name is easy - just fork the code, change the name of the executable in the Makefile, change the picture in the popup, change the window-title... Basically your average "find . -type f | grep -i 'gimp' | sed -e " job. Feed back to the original developers and upload into sourceforge. Done. Won't get you a lot of credit with the gimp-boys-and-girls, though.

Those are some awful, needlessly complicated directions directions for drawing a circle.1) Use the ellipse drawing tool while holding down Shift to define the circle.2) Under the Select menu, choose "To Path"3) Under the Edit menu choose "Stroke Path..." where you can define line width, brush style, etc.

You could replace steps 2 and 3 with Edit -> Stroke Selection, but converting to a path results in a smoother line.

Still to complex? You only need to get the location and size of the circle right once.

it is, as many solo projects, has always been in beta, but it worked well for me (though I am not really a graphic artist).

And as screwed up as the whole patent system is, you still can't patent something like CYMK because it is something fundamental to nature. What would be patentable would be the process. Two things can have the same end result as long as they don't use the same method, unles

CYMK (cyan magenta yellow black)IS a different colorspace model from rgb (red green blue) It is used in the print industry. These would be the color of the inks used to print....everything. When mixed together, these colors will give a wider range of possible colors than Red Green Blue. Basically, if you are into graphic design you deal with CYMK for anything that will end up on paper.

That's the precision of you're talking about, not range. The range in a colour space comes from which specific colours you are mixing. Losing colour when converting from one space to another is a consequence of the spaces not overlapping perfectly, i.e. some colours exist in one space but are completely outside another space (as in: no amount of mixing, bit depth and trickery will ever display that color).

Since printing presses print with CMYK and not RGB, and CMYK is not equivalent to RGB, it makes perfect sense to use the same colour space, and hence it doesn't make sense to adopt a tool that can't do that.

I'd like to suggest a colour space which treats every pixel as a small black-body, storing every colour as a long double precision floating point temperature value. It has probably already been done, and it is probably completely useless, but at least then I can troll the CMYK people by complaining that their colour-space doesn't properly support cosmic background radiation.

If you hadn't posted that, I would have had to post about my idea for representing each pixel as a 256-bit floating point number representing the wavelength of light it emitted, and watching the CMYK proponents squirm and splutter when told their preferred colour space was unable to handle infra-red and ultra-violet. Hell, if you kept enough bits for the exponent, there's no reason why it couldn't reach comfortably into MW radio!

Beside which, at the end of the day it's just an AND-OR transform. RGB is about ORing colours, CMYK is about ANDing colours (cyan reflects blue OR green, magenta reflects red OR blue, yellow reflects red OR green and black doesn't reflect anything; cyan and yellow mixed together reflect [blue OR green] AND [red OR green] = green.) CMYK support isn't the real issue, any more than religion is the real issue in Northern Ireland -- if the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England re-merged, the Paddies would still be fighting over something.

We design outside the range of what our RGB monitors can display. The monitor just gives us a rough idea of what we're going to get. We go by the CMYK values and Pantone chip books. Pantone colors are specific, specially mixed colors -- not halftoned like CMYK. Color correction is a huge issue to say the least.

Neither gamut is a strict subspace of the other. However, if you want to work in one of them, you generally don't want to work in the other. Different representations for different, erm, representations.

Not necessarily. I'm a photographer (or so I'd like to believe). I work in RGB, LAB and, very occasionally, CMYK. Dan Margulis [amazon.com] makes a pretty strong case for using all three color spaces on a routine basis. He also points out that using CMYK for professional level printing is complicated and difficult

LCDs do not 'add colour': it's a substractive process. You start with white light, which contains every colour possible, and you filter it to only let through the colours you want to display (IE, if you put a red filter in front of a while light, you only let red pass, while blocking green and blue)

In order of effectiveness vs. expense:1: Proofs. A good graphics design shop will have a printer with commercial-level print quality, with, ideally, chemically identical ink and paper to what their usual print shop will use (offset vs. fully digital.)

2: Very careful color matching. Photoshop can match colors exactly to a PANTOME color wheel, which is a selection of swatches of how a particular color will look.

3: Fake it. Design with the expectation that "red" will range anywhere from almost-pink to almos

I hope they moved the gui closer to that of Paintshop. I can't tell you how many times I've been unable to edit an image for one reason or another, or the expected behavior is what happens. I know a lot of people love GIMP and its scripting abilities, but seriously, when they're trying to enter the market dominated by a few programs with that same gui and behavior, they should replicate it.

I don't know about Paintshop, but there's a Photoshop-esque makeover for GIMP called Gimpshop. It has a couple of rough edges, but it's a testament to the modularity of design that a self-declared novice developer could take the existing GIMP framework and remake it in PS's image.

You might be surprised to learn that some GIMP developers and Krita developers have been talking with each other for a while.

While the interface used by Krita is interesting, it is not suitable for everybody. In particular, several artists and graphics professionals using GIMP want to be able to use their dual-screen setups in the most efficient way, by distributing the image windows and the docks (with the tool options and other tabs) freely over both screens. This is difficult to do when everything is embedded inside a single large window.

The current GIMP user interface is far from ideal and all developers know that. But it is not so easy to redesign it without breaking some of the features that some users came to rely on. Some major improvements to the user interface are planned for future versions, though.

but seriously, when they're trying to enter the market dominated by a few programs with that same gui and behavior, they should replicate it.

But then there is this other group of people who will complain that GIMP is just being a PhotoShop wannabe and not innovating. If one wants something that acts Just Like PhotoShop then the thing to do is suck it up and buy PhotoShop.

Gimp's UI makes more sense on a XWindows system where you can set the individual sections of the UI to stay on top. For instance, I can keep the image full-screen on one monitor while using the editing tools on a second monitor. I'd like to see a single-window app like Photoshop do that!

The single-window paradigm is a limitation of Windows, and not necessarily Photoshop. The mac version handles multiple monitors gracefully, and always has. The tool palettes also disappear when the app's not in focus -- there's no reason why they need to be separate windows, or even visible when the app's not being used.

Photoshop is also one of the few apps where the "Menus at the top" scheme makes sense virtually all the time. There are cases in which I don't like it, but for applications like Photoshop or the GIMP, which commonly manage several windows at once, there is absolutely no doubt that Apple's windowing paradigm is the best of the bunch. It certainly accounts for a good portion of Apple's dominance in the creative design industry dating back to the 90s.

I believe that recent versions of PS gained the ability to pop the canvas and pallets out of the main "root" window on Windows. You've still got the root window hanging out somewhere with the menubar in it, but you don't actually need to have anything in it. It's not optimal, but it's a limitation of the OS more than anything else.

(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting Apple's got the best scheme overall. There are certainly situations where Windows or X are clearly more efficient, and there are a lot of aspects of the OS X GUI that "bug" me. My "ideal" GUI would probably be some combination of Windows 2000, Mac OSX, and Xfce)

Windows' problem is not a technical one. IIRC, Windows 98 "properly" supported multi-monitor displays out of the box, and the support subsequently improved in Win2k and XP. I used to use Windows in a Multi-Monitor configuration all the time, and agree that it's about on par (if not superior) to Apple these days. There were also various extensions that ATI and nVidia added with their drivers that made the experience a bit smoother (ie. they did a better job of "remembering" where windows are supposed should be placed if an application is quit and re-opened).

Windows' problem is a conceptual one. The whole concept of "root" windows is arguably the Operating System's greatest limitation. Office did away with it in 2000 IIRC, and just gave each document its own window and item on the taskbar. Windows' metaphor of a document originally assumed that a given document will only ever need to interact with documents of the same type within the same application, hence the root windows. Apple took a more "multimedia" approach, giving us applications like ClarisWorks, which is still more or less unparalleled in its ability to seamlessly integrate dissimilar media types and sources into a single document. History has more or less proven that Apple's approach was the better of the two, and the whole "one app does it all" paradigm (ie. Microsoft Works) fell into obscurity.

I'd also peg this as the reason why Apple does drag-and-drop between applications SO much better. Microsoft's system of inter-application objects never really worked properly -- try embedding a not-officially-supported media file into powerpoint, and you'll see what I mean. Apple (and Quicktime especially) handle this much better -- if you install the proper (FOSS!) codec [perian.org], you can seamlessly embed Flash (FLV) videos into any application that supports the Quicktime framework, which is virtually all of them -- iMovie, Final Cut, iTunes, Keynote, etc.....

Since then, Microsoft's been tweaking their "Window" metaphor to more closely match Apple's, and have been largely successful with it. However, vestiges of the "old way" are still seen in Applications like Photoshop. Because of the menubar issue, Adobe can't efficiently port Photoshop to Windows without ditching the root window (even though the technical limitations requiring the window were removed years ago). In order to do so, each canvas would require its own menubar, which would be hideously impractical unless the number of menu options were significantly reduced so that they'd fit (which wouldn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right).

As is its nature, X has of course had this capability since its inception, but like virtually every other aspect of X, it's so difficult to use and configure, it hardly ever gets used.

Multi-monitor support is one of the coolest and tragically underused technologies out there, and it's useful across the board -- have your source open on one monitor while writing a paper on the other, edit video on one monitor and preview on the other, canvas on one monitor - pallete on the other, code on one monitor, web preview on the other, presentation on one monitor, lecture notes on the other, and the list goes on and on and on.

Big honking LCDs are dirt-cheap these days, and the productivity increase you'll see by adding an extra monitor (or just having one big high-res monitor) are incredible. I've been cursing the heavens for the past few months, as I've been stuck on a tiny 12" 1024x768 PowerBook for the past few months -- great machine, but I find myself considerably less productive without a big screen (or more than one)

1) There are no virtual desktops on OS X. Yet (ie. tomorrow). Nevertheless, this is irrelevant because....2) The concept of a "mainwindow" has never existed in Mac OS, even going back to the 80s. Every document gets its own window, and there is a permanent menubar for whatever application is in focus at the top of the screen. This is probably the single most distinctive aspect of Mac OS. As long as one of the documents is in focus, the whole application is in focus (X11 is perhaps vaguely similar in th

What exactly is wrong with the UI in the Gimp? I have always preferred the UI of the Gimp to Photoshop. I think the biggest complaint of users of Paintshop and Photoshop is that the Gimp does not use MDI. Yet, for many, this is an advantage as it works better with multiple monitors and allows for greater multitasking. (Linux and MacOS users tend not to maximize apps). Plus, if you really want MDI, just use a virtual desktop. Even Vista has them, and they offload the "window grouping" from the application to the OS, like it should be done.

Actually, my biggest complaint about the Gimp (v2.2 on the Mac), and the biggest single time-waster, is that it doesn't remember many user settings. For example, I open the program, go to open an image, it's forgotten - again - where I was (in my image directory, where else?) when I closed the program. Time to navigate the filesystem tree... again... I go to scale an image, and it's forgotten I want bicubic, that I want percent, not pixels - and this is inside the very same session. A whole bunch of UI int

I can tell you some things that drive me nuts in GIMP 2.2. (I haven't tried 2.4 yet.)

Pet Peeve #1: Image selection in the layers dialog

The Layers dialog has two modes for deciding which image's layers it'll tell you about: Either you have to explicitly select it from a drop-down, or have it auto-switch to the last image which had focus. Either way, more often than not, it seems to have the wrong image selected for me. Why?

If I'm hopping back and forth between images, say, cutting things from one and pasting them in the other, the drop-down selection will be wrong almost 100% of the time, simply because I'm hopping back and forth between images. So even though I've raised the imagine I'm interested in, and perhaps pasted something into it (which I now need to go anchor to a layer), the layers dialog points at the image I cut from, not the image I'm pasting into. So what about automatic mode?

That one sucks too. I have my window manager set to "focus follows mouse." I have only so much screen real estate. In all likelihood, the image I cut from or yet some other image lies on the path between the image I pasted in, and the layers dialog. In some cases, it can be next to impossible to move from the image I'm working with and the layers dialog without brushing past another image--thereby causing the layers dialog to select the wrong image. Again, it loses.

What I really want is the layers dialog to pick up the image I most recently interacted with. Gaining focus does not count as interaction. I should have to click something (even dead-air) or press a key to send an event into a given image's window before the layers dialog switches over to that image.

Pet peeve #2: Layer naming in the layers dialog

If you want to rename a layer in Gimp, you can double click its name in the layers dialog and start typing. So far, so good. BUT, if you don't hit [Enter], but instead just move along and click elsewhere, it'll revert your edit. This makes editing a large number of names really tedious and error prone.

(I've got a few other pet peeves with the layers dialog, such as lacking a way to select a layer AND make it the only visible layer in one go, or locking subgroups of layers together for motion rather than only having a global "lock together", or selecting groups of layers to act on simultaneously with a filter, or raising/lowering layers as a group, but I'll stop there.)

Pet peeve #3: Editing at image boundaries.

If your image is smaller than the image window, you can over-stroke an image, which is great. You can even do point-to-point strokes with both endpoints outside the image. This is fairly handy. You can't do this, though, if the image is greater than or equal to the visible area. There's no overstroke zone around the image. You either have to zoom out, or make an oversized canvas to center your image in.

Ok, suppose I go the oversized canvas route... oversized by how much? It really depends on how zoomed in or out you are. In reality, the amount of overstroke zone you need remains fairly fixed regardless of zoom level, so this isn't really an ideal solution.

Pet Peeve #4: Getting the wrong layer when trying to move things

If a given layer has a lot of "thin" structures in a sea of transparency, the move tool often grabs the layer behind rather than the layer intended, even if the intended layer is the currently active layer. GIMP should "fuzz" the opaque areas out a little bit to make them more grabbable, because chances are that's what the user wishes to move. I don't remember a time when I accidentally grabbed a layer that was too high on the Z-ordering. I curse endlessly when I grab the layer below the one I wanted though, and that happens regularly.

Pet Peeve #5: Not actually selecting the tool I just clicked.

If I click on a tool and move away too quickly, the tool gets a highlight box around it, but doesn't actually get se

Interesting. Have you tried WinImages (if you're working under Windows)? It addresses all those issues, and many more. The UI is not like Photoshop's or the Gimp's, and is demonstrably more efficient in terms of what gets done per UI interaction count.

Sounds like you're a real layers fan; WinImages has more layering power than anything else out there, hands down. 70+ blend modes, non-destructive geometric edits including scaling and rotation and a lot more.

If you have actual ideas for the GIMP UI go mention them at http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] rather then just complaining here. They are aware the UI is generally disliked, they just need the best ideas of how to change it. ---Did the Ancient Egyptians play stone, papyrus, scimitar?---

That's actually not useful in the slightest, because they're not interested in becoming more like Photoshop, they require a reason for changing the UI. Apparently they don't realize, completely ignore or have too much of a chip on their shoulder to admit that sometimes "because everyone on the fucking earth already knows how to do it this way" isn't a valid reason.

they're not interested in becoming more like Photoshop, they require a reason for changing the UI. Apparently they don't realize, completely ignore or have too much of a chip on their shoulder to admit that sometimes "because everyone on the fucking earth already knows how to do it this way" isn't a valid reason.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the earth is populated entirely by whiny photoshop fanboys.

Photoshop is going to soon suffer the same problem that i see for IBM. Open source is really starting to gain momentum. My fellow art nerds and I are all poor. We can't afford to go out and buy expensive software like photoshop; so what do we do? We go out and buy a wacom, get ourselves a copy of the GIMP and go to work. When we start getting ourselves into decision making positions, what are we going to choose? A very expensive and (imho) difficult to use piece of software like photoshop? Or a very familiar, and 100% free piece of software like the gimp?

Similarly, IBM has really shot themselves in the foot with the OS/400 platform. Here you have a a really really rock solid piece of software, arguably one of the most stable operating system/platforms in existence today, but you have a problem. If I wanted to go out and learn OS/400, I mean REALLY learn it (the way that i can with Linux/BSD) I wouldn't be able to. It is FARRRR to expensive for a hobbyist like myselft to get into.Now ask yourself, if I, or my equally poor nerd brethren, go out into the job market and are tasked with building a database for whoever we start working for, what are we going to choose? Are we going to go with the familiar, very capable, and very FREE database called MySQL or Postgres (running on top of a *nix of course)? Or are we going to opt for a very cumbersum (I mean this from the perspective of somebody who has never developed on it before, it might be very elegant for all i know) very expensive, and VERY unfamiliar database such as DB2 (which is what runs on OS/400).

Both IBM and adobe have shot themselves in the foot in this regard. Today's hobbyists are tomorrows decision makers, and they are going to choose what they are accustomed to.

Similarly, IBM has really shot themselves in the foot with the OS/400 platform. Here you have a a really really rock solid piece of software, arguably one of the most stable operating system/platforms in existence today, but you have a problem. If I wanted to go out and learn OS/400, I mean REALLY learn it (the way that i can with Linux/BSD) I wouldn't be able to. It is FARRRR to expensive for a hobbyist like myselft to get into.

They don't care. If your budget doesn't have a minimum of six zeros on the end of it, IBM is entirely disinterested in your existence.

IBM big iron is designed for those people who cannot use anything else. They have no competition. It doesn't matter if you prefer mysql or whatever - it cannot handle those kinds of loads, because it can't scale up to clusters of hundreds of thousands of CPUs. You, as a person who uses things like mysql, probably have no conception that those kinds of loads even exist. There are probably only a few hundred users in the world who need it. Nonetheless, their problems are real and have to be solved. IBM mainframe hardware is the only way to do it, so they pay a premium measured in millions. We are talking about problems that cannot be solved without filling an entire BUILDING with hardware. Most of them are related to the financial industry, who have to be able to process all the transactions in the world in real time, and where any failure of the system would cause irreparable damage to the world economy. This is up in the space where a system failure really could throw large countries into a recession overnight, so it absolutely has to be missile-proof.

This is not a consumer industry. Hobbyists are irrelevant. The consumer industry will always continue to grow and occupy most of the world, but it is never going to be able to supply those few hundred at the top, and there is always going to be a need for IBM (or somebody very similar to them) to service their needs. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I've recommended some artists to try gimp instead of proprietary stuff. The major complaints were about drawing tablet support. Gimp has tablet support, but the options available to the artist are very limited. Also, there are no smoothing algorithms for tablet-drawn strokes - a pretty major drawback if you draw on the computer instead of scanning things in.Other than that, gimp is awesome - and almost everything you can think of is available as a plugin - I've already tried the new context-sensitive resizing plugin (context-sensitive resizing has been mentioned a few months ago on/.)

Have you tried inkscape for tablet support? This appears to come from GTK so YMMV but is stated to support pressure and angle sensitivity.

I haven't, but I love the app. They've made considerable advances in the last couple of releases. I know there's a tutorial by a guy who draws and shades comics using it. Also that you can simplify lines or using some (built in python) scripts add jitter or add jitter as you draw.

If you've not tried it recently it's worth a punt.

I'm using Slackware 12 and installed the development release via autopackage (http://inkscape.org/download/?lang=en).

I've been using this in the debian unstable repo for a few weeks now and I've found the redesigns are both intuitive and useful. I especially like the new selection tool, it's much easier to select an area and then change the selection after you realized you didn't hit the right pixel. Kudos to the GIMP team!!

P.S. Although the GTK2 (i.e. GIMP Tool Kit) file picker is still slow as molasses in directories with large numbers of files. I had to hack firefox to get it to use it's native file picker once again because I got tired of waiting 30 seconds or more each time I wanted to save a file.

GIMP was NEVER intended to replace, duplicate or mimic photoshop. Neither was it created to draw users from photoshop. Unfamiliar doesn't mean bad or uncomfortable. They go their own way. Some like it, some don't. You are free to use gimpshop if you like to.
I really see no points in this interface discussion.

Probably the most useful thing in this new release is the barrel distortion correction abilities and red eye tools. I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but I hope it enables setting/saving lens parameters for different cameras.

This will definitely streamline my photo editing, as I had to go to panotools and hugin to correct the barrel distortion in my point-and-shoot cameras, but the gimp for color correction, cropping, etc. The improved color menu layout and cropping tools will be great (I always hated that alternate-diagonals cropping system it had before).

The 16 bit color and CMYK, I couldn't give half a crap about. I mean, what proportion of gimp users need that stuff anyway? One percent? Half a percent? I think most gimp detractors just like panning something for the sake of it.

The digital color world is slowly but steadily shifting to an RGB workflow. The one thing that has impeded this move is the use of 8-bit color, which effectively means mapping a 32-bit color space to a 24-bit space. This mapping is a cube-hypercube mapping done via an ICC colorspace conversion. The cube-hypercube mapping is subject to error. This error is trivialized once the RGB colorspace is in 16-bit. Then the conversion is 48-bit to 32-bit, relegating conversion errors to noise that is below the threshold of vision, or even of the output devices.

Furthermore, RGB colorspaces almost always have a wider gamut than standard CMYK colorspaces such as ISO, SWOP, and GRACoL. Here again, the 8-bit problem comes into play. When RGB color is converted to a standard CMYK colorspace, the conversion is not really even 24->32 bit, since part of the RGB space is outside the gamut of the CMYK colorspace. Effectively, this means that instead of getting a 256-step gradation in any given channel, you get a smaller gradation, sometimes (for instance in the case of Adobe98 RGB -> SWOP) a MUCH smaller gradation. This leads to stepping problems in gradiants and a loss of detail in images, particularly in shadows. Once more, the move to 16-bit RGB color eliminates these problems.

So, here's the point: By working in a 16-bit RGB color space, one can effectively do anything that they could in a CMYK colorspace. (Yes, the extra channel is nice for color correction, but not necessary). The final step, conversion to CMYK, has already been implemented in at least two open source engines: ArgyleCMS and LCMS. The conversion to CMYK in an RGB workflow, is the final step. (Unless, of course, you are printing to a lightjet, lamba, etc). The CMYK colorspace that would be used is the colorspace of the output device.

In professional color, this is not even an issue, for the most part, since most modern RIPs do this conversion for you. 16-bit color support is now starting to become universal in the RIP world. As that happens, the Gimp becomes a viable tool for professional color work.

You seem to think CMYK is somehow 32 bit (8 bits of each?) and that because 8-bit rgb has 24 bits it can't represent it, but because 16-bit rgb has 48 bits it can.

This is wrong. CMYK has FOUR dimensions. It is completely impossible to represent it in a 3 dimensional space. You claim is like saying that if I put finer graduations on a ruler, it can suddenly measure 2 dimensions rather than one!

The converters you talk about (and incidentally are in Gimp already, and in printer drivers when you send them rgb colors) map the 3-D space into the 4-D space. But they cannot fill the 4-D space, any more than you could fill a room with a piece of paper (while keeping the paper's shape a non-fractal). Thus there are CMYK colors that are not output. This has NOTHING to do with color resolution. No useful RGB->CMYK converter will produce both CMY=0,K=1 and CMY=1,K=1 output. Even if the CMYK device was 1 bit per ink and thus only capable of printing 16 different colors, you could not represent all those 16 possibilities with 24, or even 48, or 96 bits, or an infinite number of bits of rgb!

In reality the highest quality CMYK printing devices available have much less than 8 bit resolution in how much ink they lay down (once you take into account errors in ink delivery and spread). The resolution is so low that the volume represented by the RGB->CMYK conversion is over-sampled by many times when the source is 8 bit rgb. So actually 16 bits does not help one tiny bit in the area you are asking for.

The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero). If your screen shows 8 bits and the original was 8 bits, you have effectively reduced your screen to 6 bits. If the original was 16 bits (and your screen was showing the top 8 bits) then after the multiply your screen is still showing an 8 bit image (the top 8 bits of the remaining 14). (that is not real accurate, a correct program with knowledge of sRGB would do something more complex and you would lose more than 2 bits at the bright end, less at the dark end).

Also more than 8 bits should absolutely use 16 bit half float data. 16 bit integers is a total waste of effort. Float data has the advantage that it is not clamped (this eliminates gamut limitations), and that a vastly larger range of useful data. Even 16 bit data would start to lose resolution on an 8 bit screen if multiplied by more than 256 (actually somewhat larger if sRGB is correctly followed). But 16-bit float would allow a multplication by 65540 or so before there would be loss. The only reason for 16-bit integers was that older computers could not do float fast enough, but this is not a problem now, modern graphics cards even take half-float data directly.

The reason for more than 8 bits is for processing in the digital realm. For instance if your picture is 1/4 as bright as you want it, and you multiply by 4, then you lose two bits of resolution (as the bottom 2 will be zero).

There are other advantages of 16+ bits. 8-bit RGB images are usually in sRGB space, which means that the luminance of a pixel is not proportional to the pixel value, but rather something like the 2.2'th power except for a small range near zero. That is convenient for encoding a large contrast range in just 256 values, but sucks for operations that are inherently linear operators on the luminance, such as background substraction and blurring. With 16+ bits, all operations can be done in linear space without loss of resolution at the darker colors.

It's still better than Gimp. And I keep trying Gimp because I have to use windows if I want to use Photoshop.

Crossover Office has run Photoshop (through PS7, which I routinely use, *alongside* GIMP) in Linux for something like six or seven years now. That people still say "I have to use Windows if I want to run Photoshop" is beyond me.

Sorry all, I meant layer styles, those incredibly useful things that let you add various effects like outlines and shadows and then adjust them dynamically later. My brain was somewhere else when I wrote the original post.

adjustment layers, which are one of the most important editing tools IMHO and have been missing from the gimp despite years and years of people begging for them (together with cymk and a more 'standard' gui) but as usual in the OSS world features developers care about are done first, not features important for users: I will be sticking with my CS2, thanks, and given Adobe's earnings I think others are as well (I don't think CS3 is worth $200 to upgrade btw, but that's just me).

It's got layers currently, or were you needing something more specific?

Adjustment layers. If you're not familiar with the adjustment layers that Photoshop 5 software introduced, they're layers that copy pixels from layers below them and run a filter on them, and they automatically update when the layers below them are changed. It's been said that GIMP is one of the best Photoshop 3/4 clones around.

The devs have previously stated that once 2.4 was released they will start integrating GEGL which will add the ability to do adjustment layers, as well as lots of other stuff.

They said this about 2.0. Did they also say this about 2.2 and 2.4?

No, they never said that about 2.0. 2.0 was focused on revitalizing GIMP development, restructuring and modularizing its rather messy internals, plus a few features.

A few people theorized about GEGL in 2.2, but no one with a clue ever really expected it. 2.2 did add some nice new features, but it was still primarily about fixing the code up -- largely so that potential contributors wouldn't take one look at it and run screaming.

GEGL *was* expected to be in 2.4. Various things took longer than expec

Best of all, the Gimp is Free Software. You're guaranteed to be able to get at the source code and change the program.

And to the average user, this means nothing. Even though I'm a programmer, I have no desire whatsoever to work on most of the programs I use. Some, maybe. Most, no. And I'm the sort of person who's supposed to care about having access to the source! To the vast majority of people, GIMP must appeal to them on features alone (price may or may not be a feature, depending on a person's willingness to yarr-harr). Bringing up the "free software" line in a discussion on said features is pretty meaningless.

Agree 75%Artists are not the only people who ever use Gimp. Many users only use it to crop/resize images and maybe tweak the color balance a little bit. In other words, make artists your primary target, but don't ignore geeks' opinion, either.

The GUI is horrible, and it only takes a five-minute interview with a Photoshop user to understand what needs to be done.

Disagree 100%Here's why: just because Photoshop is the "industry leader" doesn't mean it's perfect - nor does it mean that the UI is perfect. What it means is simply this: it's the "industry leader".Gimp UI is actually pretty well thought out and is highly customizable. You can learn the UI inside and out in a day, even if you're really lazy/slow.

I think GIMP is suffering from a serious case of bad focus.

Agree 100%As with many other open sourced projects, the developers don't follow the same common path, but instead spread out into their areas of interest. A perfect solution would be if some company used Gimp as a base and polished it to suit the most demanding users. Just like what CrossOver Office does with Wine.

it only takes a five-minute interview with a Photoshop user to understand what needs to be done

If you ask a Photoshop user, you will mostly get answers that suggest to copy Photoshop. GIMP is not trying to be a clone of Photoshop.

On the other hand, if you ask artists who have not been involved too much with Photoshop or graphics professionals who are able to dissociate the desired functionality from one implementation that they already know, then you can get a set of very useful ideas that can bring

"High-end"? Without the ability to work in, or convert to, a printable color space, or without full support for ICC profiles? I'm not sure what your definition of "high-end" is.

Did you have a look at the release notes [gimp.org] linked from the article? Did you see the section titled "Color Management and Soft-proofing"? There is even an extra page of the release notes that focuses only on color management in GIMP 2.4 [gimp.org].

In case you did not read it, GIMP 2.4 does support ICC profiles and allows you to convert images to the appropriate color spaces. You can also identify the areas using colors that are outside your printable gamut, etc. It looks like GIMP is able to do more than you think.

I said "printable" color space and "full support" for ICC profiles. Given that GIMP doesn't support CMYK, how do you intend to print the files? And I have read about the GIMP's ICC support. It doesn't match Photoshop's.

.... and it only takes a UI expert 30 seconds to tell you so (I am telling you now).The problem you are referring to is familiarity with another UI (in this case Photoshop's one), this problem is not intrinsic to the GIMP, the developers can't do much about people unwilling to try new things, nor should they.

People happy with other tools should keep using those tools, people trying to use a new tool (for whatever reason compelling them to do so, perhaps a different set of features, or in this case perhaps a

Despite your lame attempt at humor, you make a very good point. Photoshop is a tool, and a very versatile one at that, which is used by professionals to get the job done right. It's expensive and complicated, and for good reason.

The GIMP, on the other hand, is a comparatively simple tool, though still very useful and quite versatile in its own right. It is what us amateurs use because the pro tools are overkill and/or too expensive. It also happens to be free, in more than one sense of the word, which makes it ideal for its target audience. For example, I do web graphics sometimes. Why in the world would I spend close to US$500 for something that is rarely used and would be overkill to boot? I'd rather use my free image program with more tools in its toolkit than I would ever need for that task.

This is why I will never understand the PS vs. GIMP debate. GIMP will never be a Photoshop killer because there is no need for a Photoshop killer. Those who need the power of Photoshop will buy it (or steal it), those who don't will use GIMP or another simple tool.

Like many will say where is greater then 8bit support, where are the layer filters and so on. I won't lie for the average joe and minor tasks gimp is probably just fine.

Well, since you are about the tenth person to ask this, which gets brought up in every forum where Gimp is mentioned, I'll reply with the same answer that has been repeated time and again, but doesn't seem to stick....

GEGL [wikipedia.org] is going to be the new image processing backend for Gimp. It will provide deep color support, more color spaces, and oth